So as I write this (on Saturday), Variety is reporting The Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian “will easily take the weekend crown, and its B.O. will only gain momentum from Saturday and Sunday family matinees,” although the pic’s “opening day haul came in slightly lower than industry expectations” and behind its predecessor, The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe. Nevertheless, we here at Screengrab feel confident this weekend now puts us three-for-three in our summer box office predictions! Woo-hoo!!!!
As for the actual quality of said movie...well, let me put it this way: I started reading The Chronic- (wha?)-cles of Narnia way back when I was a mere yoot, and I vividly recall The Lion, The Witch and Etc., but I petered out somewhere between Prince Caspian and The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, remembering no details about them except (spoiler alert!)...
...well, actually, I hate those spoiler alerts where they say “spoiler alert!”, like, two words before the spoiler, after you've already seen it in your peripheral vision, so let's just say I didn’t really remember very much at all about the actual plot going into Disney's film version of Prince Caspian.
The one thing I did know (aside from the afore-un-mentioned spoiler) was that, like The Lion, etc., Prince Caspian was (A) produced by (allegedly) Christian-ish Walden Media because (B) C.S. Lewis included certain overt Christian allegories in the Narnia books, meaning (C) the Narnia films are the summer blockbusters of choice for all the good, upstanding Christian families out there who don’t want to risk eternal damnation by supporting Harry Potter and his evil pagan agenda.
The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe featured a simple good versus evil story, complete with temptation, redemption and the sacrifice and resurrection of Christ-like super-lion, Aslan...none of which struck me as particularly dogmatic or objectionable. I mean, despite our many, many differences as a species, I'm pretty sure, at the very least, that Christians, Jews, Muslims, Buddhists, Wiccans, pagans, atheists, Unitarians and pretty much everyone else (except maybe those pesky Satanists) can agree that good people are better than bad people, too much Turkish delight is unhealthy and being enslaved by an evil witch is a relatively bad form of government.
That said, the religious message in Prince Caspian seems noticeably more pronounced while at the same time, far less cohesive. Whether this is due to bad scripting or my own personal issues with certain aspects of Christian doctrine (or both) is unclear. The story, set hundreds of years after the first installment, takes place in a world where the happy, magic creatures of Narnia have been mostly wiped out by nasty humans called Telmarines. Aslan, the protector of goodness and niceness, has gone mysteriously and conspicuously AWOL in the interim, and it’s up to the young heroes of the first tale (siblings Peter, Susan, Edmund and Lucy) to join forces with the exiled Telmarine Prince Caspian and the myriad talking badgers, dwarves, centaurs and whatnot of Narnia to restore freedom and equality to the kingdom.
So far so good...but underlying all the swords-and-sorcery swashbuckling is the question of whether or not Aslan will finally show up and help our heroes defeat the forces of evil. Again, without (ahem) giving anything away, the agnostic in me couldn’t help but think, well, wait a minute...sure, it’s an allegory for having faith and whatnot, but does the message really work if it defies storytelling logic? In the movie’s rigged deck, all the Narnians who’ve suffered terribly for hundreds of years because Aslan inexplicably vamoosed on them are implicated as somehow spiritually inferior to pure, faithful Lucy, who pops into Narnia out of the blue, hasn’t suffered at all and has visions of Aslan nobody else gets to see. In other words, the non-believers have lost their faith because they have no proof of Aslan’s existence, while Lucy says they should have faith, even though her faith is based on the very proof the others don’t have...and let’s just say the internal logic doesn’t exactly resolve itself in the film’s overlong CGI finale.
Another curious aspect of the Narnia films, given the recent national panty-twist about Miley Cyrus’ naked back in Vanity Fair, is the way nobody in the world seems to care about all the people getting shot by arrows, hacked with swords and otherwise, y’know, killed dead dead dead by the teenage Pevensie children (and, yes, I know they're supposed to be hundreds of years old in the story, etc., etc., but work with me here). In The Lion, The Witch & The Wardrobe, the kids pretty much just killed beasties, but this time around, they're wasting flesh-and-blood humans...BAD, freedom-hating, kinda shifty, olive-skinned foreign-looking humans, sure...and I know America loves violence and hates sex and whatnot...but I do find it curious that most of America seems to go completely bug-eyed, batshit crazy at the mere idea of teenagers as sexual beings (despite, y’know, all the heavy petting and whatnot America did in high school) and yet America's totally cool with the concept of teenagers killing people as long as it's in a family film and not one of the Grand Theft Auto cities. ‘Cuz, y’know, that shit leads to Columbine.
All the too-much-thinking aside, though, Prince Caspian was relatively exciting and plenty entertaining enough for a Saturday afternoon, allowing Peter Dinklage to somehow maintain his dignity as a soulful, cranky dwarf warrior called Trumpkin.
Bring the whole family!